Inside ‘Westworld’ Season 2’s Costume Design: How Shogunworld, The Raj, and More Came To Life

Westworld Costume Designer Sharen Davis said she found the inspiration for Maeve's Shogunworld dress in the character's original saloon dress: "I found a little floral pattern in that and then I thought, I'm going to expand this and make the kimono out of it."

Photos: HBO

When Westworld costume designer Sharen Davis designed Grace's looks for The Raj, she wanted to keep the color palette as light as possible. "I wanted almost like a nude, but a very appealing and soft color," Davis told us.

Photos: HBO

What's Davis's favorite Westworld Season 2 look so far? She tried not to play favorites, but admitted a soft-spot for Musashi: "He was my first character that I started making clothes for, so I guess that was my favorite."

Every detail in Westworld tells a story, and perhaps no detail helps an actor find their character quite like a costume. In Westworld Season 2, Costume Designer Sharen Davis has the tremendous task of outfitting scores of characters as they traverse multiple worlds over various separate timelines…and often she’s as much in the dark about where the show’s plot is going as the rest of us.

“Usually I was given a little clue, because I mean, you don’t want me to work five days on something that cannot be in the show because something else is gonna be in the next episode,” Davis said with a chuckle. “Sometimes I would only get a little, ‘Okay you don’t want to do that, you may want to go in this direction,’ and that may be all I get. So it’s really amazing how [showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy] work and how creative they are.”

Davis joked that even the actors she was dressing didn’t know what was next for their character. “They don’t know where the character is going! We’re doing the fitting and I would say, ‘I would ask you, but you probably don’t even know either.’ They just trust!”

Designing costumes for HBO’s Westworld is nothing short of a challenge, and it’s one that two-time Academy Award nominee Davis is more than worthy of. A veteran of films like Dreamgirls and Django Unchained, Davis told us over the phone recently that the pace and scale of Westworld both excited her the most. The production has over seven warehouses chock full of costumes — “I don’t even know how to put that into a number,” she joked — and almost each week calls for for a bold, new creative direction. In Season 2 of Westworld, we travel to the pleasure palaces of The Raj, go back in time to when the park was first pitched, and finally witness the mayhem of Shogunworld.

Since this was Davis’s first season working on the show, Shogunworld was one of the key places where she was able to leave her creative mark. According to Davis, her team studied the Edo period extensively, but let themselves throw certain things out the window.

“We used the silhouette, but in Westworld tradition, I didn’t use authentic fabric. We used our own color palette to represent Westworld,” Davis explained. “Basically, we didn’t use large print kimonos with the big flowers and stuff. We stayed very subtle and that’s a little more Westworld. It’s not so busy with prints and bright colors. So that works fine enough in this situation, but its very limiting. So to make that work was really hard.”

Making the kimonos themselves also proved to be difficult. “Kimonos take months to make, and we had weeks. There is so much structure for under them. It was really, we were like [working] 24/7 around the clock. We had so many people in town making kimonos. Like 5 different sowing houses making things because they are so time sensitive and they could only make them so fast,” she said.

Photo: HBO

Adding to the stress, it turned out that of all the Westworld actors, the Shogunworld guest stars were at the most liberty to tweak and change their specific looks. “It’s very interesting because that cast was specifically Japanese and really knew how to do kimono and fold kimono. They were very particular to how it fit,” Davis said. Davis had lived in Japan for five years, but still took their words to heart. “Of course I would listen to them because they would know. They had more say in their clothes than anybody else.”

In Shogunworld, some of Westworld’s most popular hosts come face to face with their Edo-era alter-egos. The leather-clad bandit Hector Escaton (Rodrigo Santoro) meets his match in Shogunworld’s leather-accessorized ronin Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Maeve (Thandie Newton) almost immediately sees herself in geisha Akane (Rinko Kikuchi). The revelation that Sizemore (Simon Quartermane) has cribbed storylines from Westworld to use in other parks comes subtly and then explodes as a revelation. Costumes are what offer the greatest clues.

Photo: HBOPhoto: HBO

“Yeah, that’s the challenge of this episode, is trying to mimic each of these characters in a Japanese world. It was quite fun, and very subtly done, but it’s there: the leather is there, everything is there still,” Davis said. “And there are colors that really kimonos aren’t, like the green for Sakura because that really is the green of Clementine.”

One showstopper look that merged Shogunworld’s silhouettes with Westworld’s vibe was Maeve’s final kimono. The garment is burgundy like dried blood and makes Maeve stand apart from the Shogun’s crowds of armored soldiers. Davis explained that once again, she took the pattern out of Westworld: “I actually drew it off of her regular red dress — well, ‘regular,’ her gorgeous saloon dress. I found a little floral pattern in that and then I thought, I’m going to expand this and make the kimono out of it. So I found a beautiful floral that wasn’t no where near Japanese or the period, and thought, ‘I’m gonna be daring and make the kimono out of this.’ So it was really fun.”

Davis elaborated on the changes by saying, “Costume design is you taking risks sometimes and not being so authentic, otherwise you’re just doing a documentary. In Westworld, even the western clothes aren’t really that of the period, there is a twist to them too. It’s just an awesome opportunity to create from something that was authentic.”

Of course, Shogunworld was only one of the new parks that Davis had to design costumes for this season. Westworld also introduced us to The Raj. The new park was used to introduce us to William’s daughter, Emily, played by Katja Herbers. As a guest, Emily (or Grace, as she’s sometimes called) gets to choose her own wardrobe. Davis designed a gorgeous beige gown for Herbers that was meant to show off as much skin as possible.

Photo: HBO

“When there is a guest — which is what she was — their clothes would reflect a little more fun and be a little more creative than the actual host. So I decided to make a more comfortable dress than what she should be wearing if it was a period dress. I mean I think some of the guests have the options to actually dress the period, too, but I decided to make a few people a little more contemporary with the style of India as opposed to a total sari or a total English 1920s dress,” Davis said.

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“I have a million illustrations of how I got to that dress. It started completely different. It started a little more ‘Indian,’ and then it kept getting sexier and sexier… I wanted almost like a nude, but a very appealing and soft color. Appealing to the body too because it draped on her body and it wasn’t bright, so it was almost like skin.”

Other productions lean heavily on recycling period costumes that have been used in past productions or on rejuvenated vintage pieces. But Westworld‘s unique storytelling demands preclude this option. “You can definitely find some [vintage pieces], but you can’t find them in multiples,” Davis explained. “So when someone cuts off your neck or something, you have a lot of blood. Every time there is some kind of accident, I need five or six [costumes], I can’t just have one. One will never work. So the thought of using originals pieces or vintage pieces are really out of the question.”

But Westworld isn’t just about traveling to the fantasy version of an historical period. At its heart, it’s a sci-fi thriller set in the future. When we leave the park, or see its workers in casual dress, we have to feel like we’re in the not-so-distant future. That means that Davis also has to provide sleek, tailored design that takes viewers on a ride into the future.

Photo: HBO

Davis created a new look for Dolores to wear at the start of Season 2, Episode 2. It’s a sexy and sleek black dress that matches the high-collared white dresses we saw hosts wear in Season 1 (and again in Season 2), but it stood out thanks to its exquisite tailoring.

“I call this kind of wardrobe timeless modern,” Davis said. “You have to be so careful of zippers, and buttons, and collars. You have to stay very neutral on those levels. You can see there’s barely any pattern in the clothing; usually it’s solid, very tailored lines that are timeless. You may see the lines from the ’20s or ’30s, but the design will be more modern, and the fabric will be more modern.”

When asked if she had a favorite costume, Davis demurred, saying “Every episode I have a favorite thing,” before admitting that she was particularly fond of Musashi’s armor. “[It] had a lot of leather in it. It’s kinda dark, so you can’t really see it, but I loved doing it for him. He was my first character that I started making clothes for, so I guess that was my favorite.”